


Return

by brightingales (zoeteniets)



Category: Hollyoaks
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2018-12-13
Packaged: 2019-09-17 17:07:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16978575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zoeteniets/pseuds/brightingales
Summary: Harry does not receive a warm welcome when he returns to the village.For the prompt: Cold – “Let it Snow"





	Return

_‘As long as you love me so…’_

James doesn’t respond when the cashier asks him if he has any plans for the evening. He simply takes his bottle of whiskey from the counter, not even waiting for the receipt. He  _does_  have plans – he’s just not in the mood to make small talk about them. He’s going to listen to whatever concert or opera his favourite radio station is broadcasting tonight, drink the entirety of the bottle now clasped in his fingers, and try very hard not to wake up until this disaster of a year is finally over. It’s better than any other plan he has come up with recently.

Romeo had invited him to Prince and Lilly’s New Year party, but James had declined. While their relationship has improved since their first disastrous confrontation (Romeo is surprisingly perceptive. He’ll make a good lawyer, one day) they are nowhere near the stage where James would feel comfortable “hanging out” with a bunch of adolescents. Marine is out of town, Alfie is with his friends, and James’s work colleagues are throwing a party in their office. If he was in the mood for company he could easily tag along, but he can’t stand another evening filled with the pitying looks that have been thrown his way ever since October and all the revelations it brought with it. He is, as ever, much better off on his own.  

James’s phone buzzes and a short message from Ellie lights up the screen. He smiles at the picture of herself she has sent: a selfie from a café somewhere in Porto, drinking a hot chocolate that’s in a mug the size of her face. He probably should have gone away too. But an urgent appointment with a client had kept him in Hollyoaks – work is literally the only thing keeping him in this godforsaken place now.

Phone in hand, his thumb moves across the screen without any conscious input from his brain, and soon he is staring at Harry’s number and the record of their very last conversation on that fateful October day. This is his tenth attempt to delete the number in as many weeks. But something always stops him.

Hope tastes like bitter coffee. Like white wine that has been left out in the sun too long. Hope is the leap of his heart into his throat every time a young man with blond hair passes by him in the street. Hope is the itch against his leg when phone buzzes in his pocket.

Every single time he has to swallow down a mouthful of disappointment as he realises that Harry still hasn’t been in contact. James knows that he can’t keep this up; he’s given Harry plenty of opportunities to follow his heart. If Harry was going to choose him, he would have done it by now. Wherever he’s gone off to, James is probably the furthest thing from his mind. While that realisation had stung like a thousand paper cuts when James had first come to it, now he is simply cold all over.

Harry has been the beating heart of his universe for so long that it feels more than strange to have cut him out so suddenly. There is only a deep and gaping chasm where he used to be, and all James can do is teeter on the edge of the abyss within his soul and try not to tumble in.

He tries to cushion himself against the endless feeling of falling anyway, curling up on the sofa with soft blankets and velveteen pillows. He’s washed them over and over again, trying to rid himself of every trace of Harry in the apartment, from the forgotten socks he had discovered kicked haphazardly under a futon to the smell of his cheap deodorant that lingered persistently to every scrap of fabric even after the man himself was long gone.

And gone he has.

No one told him. But then, why should they? He was the villain of the tale after all. It wasn’t until two weeks later that James himself had realised Harry was absent – too wrapped up in his own heartbreak to notice that the cause of it had drifted so far away.

James swallows the whiskey in one big gulp. He doesn’t let himself enjoy the taste.

The opening strings of the concert (an opera, actually. How he wishes that his favourite art form wasn’t now tainted by the memory of his almost-date with Harry) begins as James settles down to try and enjoy the evening. If he clutches the whiskey glass close enough to his chest maybe there will be enough pressure to stop the persistent internal bleeding from maw that gapes where his heart should be.

As the overture ends, there is a knock at the door.

He ignores it.

More knocking.

He turns the volume of the radio up and turns his face away from the door.

The knocking continues. James listens to it and tries to find a way to match the rhythm of the kicking with the percussion section of the orchestra. It’s almost soothing. He could drift off to it.

“James. Please. Let me in.”

The voice is soft, only whispered through his letterbox, and yet he’s still so tuned in to the sound of that particular quiet tone that he is sure he’d be able to hear it uttered across oceans.

Harry has such a habit of barging in that James is surprised by the restraint he is exercising tonight. But then James remembers – Harry had left his key behind the last time they were able to say a proper goodbye. And James has learnt his lesson about keeping a key under the mat too.

“James… James… Let me in…”

He glares accusingly at his copy of ‘Wuthering Heights’ where it sits wedged between ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ and ‘Lorna Doone’. He should leave the living room and all the ghosts of past-Harrys that linger there. He could go to his bedroom and lock the door against them, batten down the hatches, and wait for this particular storm to pass.

But when he rises from the sofa to move out of earshot of the pleading man at his door his treacherous feet betray him and lead him straight to it.

Harry stays on the step as James finally opens the door to him. He looks smaller somehow. There is a light dusting of snow sticking to his hair and his cheeks are apple-red from the icy wind that howls outside.

“You shouldn’t be here…” James tells him.

“I couldn’t…” and for a tiny bright spark of a hopeful moment James hears the sentence end ‘ _give up on you’._

“Go home, Harry,” James says, trying not to think about how Harry had once called this place their home.

Harry either doesn’t hear him or chooses to ignore him. Probably the later. When James closes the door, Harry is on the opposite side to the one James intended for him to be on.

 _Now what?_  James wants to ask.  _Why are you here? Can’t you leave me to lick my wounds in peace?_  But when he opens his mouth the only thing that comes out is: “Do you want a drink?”

“Please.”

The room is silent as he pours. Silent, except, of course, for the opera still sounding from the radio’s speakers.

“I didn’t choose it on purpose,” James tells Harry, feeling the need to say something.

“I’m sorry?” Harry takes the offered glass and drinks its contents in one big gulp. James shrugs and pours him another.

“The opera. I just put on whatever was on the radio. It’s  _Der Rosenkavalier_  – The Rose-Knight.”

“Oh. What’s it about?”

Here comes the punchline: “The main character is a countess who, over the course of the opera, realises that she should let her young lover go so that he can be with his one true love.” James tries not to grimace. “It’s meant to be a comedy.”

James takes up his own glass, turns the radio off, and throws himself back onto the sofa, stretching out so that there is no room for Harry to join him there. Harry might be in the flat, but James still needs to keep his distance; if he touches him again, he knows he’ll never be able to let him go. And he cannot guarantee that Harry will allow himself to be caught again, or that he won’t simply melt into thin air the moment the morning light comes.

Harry’s eyes follow the line of James’s body. James feels the way that they travel from his feet, up to the sensitive skin of his ankles and further up the calves and thighs that he has wrapped around Harry’s own so often. He stands there, doing nothing but look at him – still as a statue and just as cold.

Two can play at that game.

“Well?” James demands, “What do you want?”

Harry’s eyes remain fixed at their point on James’s belt buckle. His gaze is anything but suggestive.

“I want you back.”

James rolls his eyes. “What a cliché.”

“I mean it.”

“Well, tough. I don’t want you. You can leave now.”

“James… I don’t understand… Why are you being so cold to me?”

Harry at least has the good sense to put his whiskey glass down on the table before collapsing into the armchair beside him. For a brief, terrifying moment, James is worried that Harry is hurt or ill before he is crushed once more by the memory that Harry’s health is no longer any concern of his. Still, he can’t help his need to sit up straight and start looking Harry over for signs of injury. Not that Harry is helping him much; the younger man gives one big sob and then hides his face in his hands.

Something about Harry’s accusation of ‘coldness’ has struck a chord deep within James. “Did you really…?” James can’t help but ask. “Did you really come back just to ask for my forgiveness?”

“Yes…” Harry replies, his voice so quiet and muffled by his hands that James barely hears it.

“It’s New Year’s Eve, isn’t it?” He continues as he finally wipes away his tears and looks James in the eye once more. “’Should auld acquaintance be forgot’ and all that. I thought maybe, this was the right time to come back… but…”

“You went to your family first…?” James says. Jealousy and disappointment churn in his stomach. He’s  _still_  not at the top of Harry’s list of priorities.

“I dropped off Dee Dee and Anthony’s Christmas presents. They weren’t in.”

“Would you have stayed there, if they were?”

“I don’t know…”

James considers the young man sitting in his armchair. Harry looks better than the last time he was away from the village. Whoever he’s been staying with, they’ve been treating him well. Better than James ever did.

He gets up. Opens the front door.

“You need to leave,” he tells Harry.

“What? No!”

“Yes.”

“At least tell me why!”

James closes the door against the frigid air outside and turns to face the man who is clearly not budging from his spot in James’s living room.

“Because I can’t do this again Harry. I can’t hold on to you anymore. I chased you for years. I begged for any scrap of affection you would give me. I laid my heart bare at your feet. And you rejected me at every turn. I was your afterthought. Your last option. Your second best.”

“James…” Harry tries to interrupt.

“I can’t do it again, Harry!” James says, almost too sharply. “I can’t love you and lose you all over again. I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”

Harry’s voice is small when he finally replies. “But I can’t walk away from you again…”

They stand there, at an impasse, for what feels like an age. Neither of them is willing to budge from their position, both in the living room and in their relationship.

Harry is the first one to speak.

“When I imagined what it would be like, coming back, I never thought that it would be like this. I thought maybe you would shout at me. That you would throw me out like last time…”

“I just tried that.”

“No, you didn’t. You’ve hurled me out of that door before; you could do it again. This is different. You’re different.”

Harry finally moves, but he goes to the kitchen, not to the front door. He opens the fridge, takes a bottle of white wine and pours two glasses. He takes them back to where James is still and holds one out for him to take. The wine is so chilled there is condensation already forming on the glass as he takes it from Harry’s hand.

“There is a coldness to you now,” Harry says, sinking back into the armchair. “And I can’t bear the thought that I was the one who did that to you.”

Harry takes a big gulp of his wine, “James, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry that I hurt you. I’m sorry that I messed you around. I’m sorry that I doubted you and what you felt for me. I’ve been so awful to you – I used you and manipulated you and I just… I’m just…”

Harry’s voice gets quieter and quieter until it’s descended into little more than a whisper.

“When you imagined this,” James asks, “seeing me again. Did you always think that I would be angry with you?”

Harry’s been avoiding eye contact, but he looks directly at James now. Confusion knits his brow and he honestly looks like he is surprised James is still talking to him.  

“I guess so. I thought you’d be… I don’t know… more passionate? I thought you’d have more to say – you’re never usually short for words. But maybe… maybe I never really knew you at all…”

The last words are lost to a sob. It’s all that it takes for James’s resolve to completely melt. If it was anyone else, he’d be able to keep up the façade – to appear calm, and cool, and collected when all he wants to do is scream and sob. But with Harry? He is incapable of being dishonest with him. And that means he has to be honest with himself too.

He wants this. He wants Harry. He wants it all.

James puts his wine glass down before going over to where Harry is sitting, sinking to his knees before him, and taking up his hands in his own.

“I’m sorry,” James says, deeply, sincerely, looking deep into Harry’s eyes so that he can see how deeply he means it.

“No… no… I’m the one who should be apologising to you…!”

“I threw you out, Harry. I sent you away not knowing where you could go to. And I never gave you the chance to explain.”

“I hurt you.”

“Yes. You did.” James squeezes his hands even tighter. “But I forgive you. And I’m guessing you forgive me?”

Harry nods his head vigorously, so James continues talking.

“I’m sorry for being cold with you now. I was just trying to protect myself. To make sure that this is what you want.”

“It is, James. You’re all I want.”

It’s Harry’s turn to move. He squeezes back, and then pulls, dragging James forward and up so that their faces can press together, and their lips finally meet in a kiss.

It’s a homecoming, James realises. Home his here, soft and safe and warm, on Harry’s lips.

James warps his arms around Harry’s neck at the same time as Harry grips his waist pulling them both together even tighter. James can feel the parts of Harry’s jumper that still haven’t dried from the cold winter rain outside, can feel the contrasting heat of the skin of his neck, suddenly flushing with heat and desire.

James could stay here forever. Except, his knees make a sudden protest and he breaks away with a wince.

“Any comments about my age and I really will throw you out.”

For a brief second, a look of abject terror crosses Harry’s face. But then he relaxes in beautiful relief as he realises that James is still grasping on to one of his hands in a grip so strong it will never break.

“What now?” Harry asks.

“Bedroom?”

“Really?” Harry perks up adorably.

“Yes, but just to cuddle. I want…” It seems silly to admit it, but this is Harry he is talking to. “I just want to get under the sheets, turn the lights off, and enjoy having you back in my arms. Is that ok?”

“Ok?” Harry says. “As long as you still love me,I don’t care what happens next.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for @happyjarryholidays over on tumblr. Find me there @brightingales for more jarry nonsense.


End file.
